Tricycle Blog

Happy 15th, Himalayan Art Resources! Created by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation in 1997, the HAR website has come a long way in its mission to create a comprehensive education and research database and virtual museum of Himalayan art. It remains the only digital collection of its kind.
The Himalayan Art Resources website was established in 1997. The 15th Anniversary has actually passed as of several months ago without fanfare. At that time the HAR staff were extremely busy with new collections and cataloguing and did not have the opportunity to make announcements or celebrate.
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Guess who's Buddhist now? Jennie Garth!
The paparazzi snapped the Beverly Hills, 90210 actress in Los Angeles on Monday carrying Eight Steps to Happiness: The Buddhist Way of Loving Kindness, a commentary on the Eight Verses for Training the Mind by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso of the New Kadampa tradition.
So I guess we'll have to wait and see if Jennie is really the latest celebrity to jump on the Buddhist bandwagon. We'll know for sure when she comes out with her own meditation program...
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Buddhist practice and Buddhist art have been inseparable in the Himalayas ever since Buddhism arrived to the region in the eighth century. But for the casual observer it can be difficult to make sense of the complex iconography. Not to worry—Himalayan art scholar Jeff Watt is here to help. In this "Himalayan Buddhist Art 101" series, Jeff is making sense of this rich artistic tradition by presenting weekly images from the Himalayan Art Resources archives and explaining their roles in the Buddhist tradition.
Himalayan Buddhist Art 101: Life Event Paintings
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Biography and autobiography in Tibet are important sources for both education and inspiration. Tibetans have kept such meticulous records of their teachers that thousands of names are known and discussed in a wide range of biographical material. All these names, all these lives—it can be a little overwhelming. The authors involved in the Treasury of Lives are currently mining the primary sources to provide English-language biographies of every known religious teacher from Tibet and the Himalaya, all of which are organized for easy searching and browsing. Every Tuesday on the Tricycle blog, we will highlight and reflect on important, interesting, eccentric, surprising and beautiful stories found within this rich literary tradition.
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Fox Bones
To write a poem is to study oneself. To strip away all but the sinews, and then the sinews. A jawbone stuck out of the dirt— young fox with still-perfect teeth. I keep in on my desk. Everything is made of mystery. And then it all disappears.
Chase Twichell's most recent book is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems (2010). She is a student at Zen Mountain Monastery.
Image: Donald Maculey/flickr
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In this week's retreat teaching, Balancing Emotions, Segyu Rinpoche of the Juniper School shows us how to practice analytical meditation. By using it to develop awareness of our emotional patterns and triggers, we can begin to transform our inner habits and lead a more balanced emotional life.
Rinpoche breaks down analytical meditation into a four-phase process: familiarity, reasoning, application to our lives, and insight, which becomes the object of our concentration. He also introduces us to a way of reframing our emotional vocabulary by going through the Juniper School's five emotional scales of assertiveness, contentment, realism, compassion, and self-value. Through practicing analytical meditation, he says, we can "dismantle that story, that structure, which has that component that leads us into affliction, leads us into suffering, leads us into stress."
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International Women’s Day was instated in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America. Originally titled “International Working Women’s Day,” the event simultaneously commemorated the protests for the labor rights of women and furthered its cause. While its current de facto recognition might be likened to a sort of Mother’s Day that includes both childbearing and non-childbearing females alike, International Women’s Day is properly a labor movement, and a feminist one.
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Buddhist practice and Buddhist art have been inseparable in the Himalayas ever since Buddhism arrived to the region in the eighth century. But for the casual observer it can be difficult to make sense of the complex iconography. Not to worry—Himalayan art scholar Jeff Watt is here to help. In this "Himalayan Buddhist Art 101" series, Jeff is making sense of this rich artistic tradition by presenting weekly images from the Himalayan Art Resources archives and explaining their roles in the Buddhist tradition.
Himalayan Buddhist Art 101: New Discoveries
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The following interview was previously published at Stories Untold: Interviews and Synthesis by Erik Campano on Patheos.com, and is adapted here with permission.
Recently Patheos has been putting the spotlight on American evangelical Christians’ efforts to fight human trafficking, as well as the critique from some academics that these efforts amount to the wrongful imposition of Protestant values on “rescued victims” (in quotes because both are controversial terms). There deserves to be, however, a broader range of conversations about trafficking that widens the lens beyond American Christian anti-trafficking work to include efforts in other countries undertaken by other faith traditions.
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On Sunday, March 17, our friends over at New York Insight Meditation Center will be hosting a benefit in honor of their 15th anniversary. Senior teacher and Tricycle contributor Sylvia Boorstein will be teaching the Metta Sutta, the Buddha's sermon in impartial kindness, as the complete guide to practice. The afternoon will include study, meditation, and a Q&A—all suitable for beginners.
The event will take place at New York Insight on Sunday, March 17, from 1:30 to 4:30pm. The cost is $50.
Find more details on their website here.
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Biography and autobiography in Tibet are important sources for both education and inspiration. Tibetans have kept such meticulous records of their teachers that thousands of names are known and discussed in a wide range of biographical material. All these names, all these lives—it can be a little overwhelming. The authors involved in the Treasury of Lives are currently mining the primary sources to provide English-language biographies of every known religious teacher from Tibet and the Himalaya, all of which are organized for easy searching and browsing. Every Tuesday on the Tricycle blog, we will highlight and reflect on important, interesting, eccentric, surprising and beautiful stories found within this rich literary tradition.
The Pakpa Lha Incarnation Line
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In 1959 the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet to settle in India, where then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru provided him and his followers assistance. Since then, over 150,000 Tibetans have followed in their leader’s footsteps, settling into camps across the country—the biggest democracy in the world. These settlements, like the Tibetan people’s stay in India, were not supposed to last.
In a recent article for The Asian Age, journalist Maura Moynihan writes about the structural crisis now unfolding in the Tibetan-exile world.
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Segyu Rinpoche is the founder of the Juniper school, whose apt motto is "Buddhist Training for Modern Life." In this four-part retreat, the Brazilian-born teacher in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism introduces us to the the four building blocks of transformation—meditation, balancing emotions, cultivating compassion, and developing insight.
In his opening talk, Awakening the Mind and Meditation, Segyu Rinpoche instructs us in meditation, which he calls "the cornerstone of transformation." With his detailed instructions on posture and breathing, he emphasizes the importance of a steady and consistent practice if we're truly serious about training our minds.
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Well, boys and girls, the discussion ain't over. (As it shouldn't be.) Soto Zen priest and author James Ishmael Ford has added his voice into the mix of American Buddhist teachers who are remarking on the Joshu Sasaki Roshi sex scandal. Unlike some of the other commentaries, which read with more passion than careful analysis, Ford takes a helpful step backward to look at the American Zen picture as a whole. As he writes, "Sex isn't the problem." In his view, the problem is our glamorization of our spiritual teachers, as well as the lack of institutional and personal accountability. He writes,
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Meditation month is wrapping up, and though I'm pretty sure I've achieved nothing, I have—I hope—developed some insight into "real happiness." The most pronounced of these is the insight that real happiness isn't so great. In fact, for anyone with half an imagination, it's opposite ("fake happiness," "conventional happiness"?) is far superior. While conventional happiness is filled with bouts of joy and connection, not to mention endless congratulations, awards and achievements, Cold Beer and Beautiful Girls, real happiness has something to do with sustained attention and—can't forget—accords with reality.
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Buddhist practice and Buddhist art have been inseparable in the Himalayas ever since Buddhism arrived to the region in the eighth century. But for the casual observer it can be difficult to make sense of the complex iconography. Not to worry—Himalayan art scholar Jeff Watt is here to help. In this "Himalayan Buddhist Art 101" series, Jeff is making sense of this rich artistic tradition by presenting weekly images from the Himalayan Art Resources archives and explaining their roles in the Buddhist tradition.
Read Part 1.
Himalayan Buddhist Art 101: Why Paintings Are Made, Part 2
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As we near the close of Meditation Month at Tricycle, I thought it'd be nice to leave you with some good reading.
It's not easy to maintain a meditation practice for many of us. As laypeople especially, it's difficult to see ourselves through the clutter of life to the cushion. This is why it's important to make sure that our surroundings are conducive to practice. I find Thanissaro Bhikkhu's writing on this particularly helpful. As a busy layman, I need all the help I can get, and I've found the Thai forest monk's most recent book, With Each & Every Breath, particularly helpful. This is what he writes on how to optimize our surroundings for a steady meditation practice:
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Last week Tricycle caught up with film director and Planetary Collective founding member Guy Reid to talk about the group's short film Overview and their forthcoming feature film Continuum. The Collective, founded in 2011, responds to the most pressing issues our civilization is currently facing as we push the planet to its brink. Its members, pulling from their Buddhist backgrounds, attribute the roots of the environmental and social crises facing humanity to the misperception that we are separate—from each other, the planet and the cosmos as a whole. The solution, they contend, can be found in an emerging worldview that points to our interdependence.
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Biography and autobiography in Tibet are important sources for both education and inspiration. Tibetans have kept such meticulous records of their teachers that thousands of names are known and discussed in a wide range of biographical material. All these names, all these lives—it can be a little overwhelming. The authors involved in the Treasury of Lives are currently mining the primary sources to provide English-language biographies of every known religious teacher from Tibet and the Himalaya, all of which are organized for easy searching and browsing. Every Tuesday on the Tricycle blog, we will highlight and reflect on important, interesting, eccentric, surprising and beautiful stories found within this rich literary tradition.
More »